Sign up, and CougarBoard will remember which categories you want to view. Sign up
Jul 16, 2021
12:30:55pm
gwalker All-American
I last played the saxophone over thirty years ago. Fascinating brain experience
over the last two days. But first, some background. And I guess if you count the two weeks where I broke my saxophone out and played with a roommate who was also a sax player, it has only been 30 years and not more than thirty years. Anyway, I have my grandpa's old tenor sax that has just been sitting around the house all that time. He was a big-band leader in the late 1930s and early 1940s (not any famous band, but he made a living with it). Somewhere along the line the mouthpiece was taken out of the case and I have no idea where it is.

All of my kids are very musical, with a couple playing instruments consistently even after high school. My oldest decided to buy a new mouthpiece and some reeds for me and he cleaned the pads and did some other maintenance work on it without me knowing. A couple of days ago, he surprised me with the mouthpiece and the reeds. Wednesday night he broke out his Real Book (a book with arrangements of a whole bunch of songs if you've never heard of it) and got me to play for about twenty minutes. I remembered how to hold the sax and I could produce a decent sound, but I lacked the same range and tone quality I used to have. I could read the music the same way I read when I sing. That is to say I could see what was a quarter note or a half note or whatever. And I could tell when it was rising or falling along the range of notes. But I had no idea which keys to press to produce any of the notes. He showed me a few and it felt like learning a foreign language I had never spoken before. I could pick up a few basic things but it was a struggle.

Then, last night, I broke out the sax and the book and played again. I looked at a different piece of music from the night before. The second I looked at the page, I remembered where my fingers were supposed to go to play each note. It was like a light switch turning on and it came with instant illumination. I still couldn't remember the names of the notes (except middle "C") and a couple of others I could pause and reason through to determine what each one should be called. But I just played through the song like I had never forgotten the fingerings.

The contrast between Wednesday night and last night was astonishingly stark. And I did nothing to bring it about (other than playing one night and playing again the next). I would not have thought regaining the memories could happen that quickly or as completely as it did without experiencing it. And I don't say that to brag about me. I think tons of people can have the same kinds of experiences with memory and recall.

I am often fascinated by memory and recall and how it works in astonishing ways some times and then almost not at all in some other situations. Both within the experience of the same individual, functioning at the same general cognitive ability. I look forward to learning more about that in the eternities.

In the meantime, I have talked my wife (who plays the piano) into accompanying me to learn how to play the Duke Ellington/John Coltrane arrangement of "In a Sentimental Mood." Of course, I won't sound like Coltrane, but in a week or two I think I can have a passable rendition ready.
This message has been modified
Originally posted on Jul 16, 2021 at 12:30:55pm
Message modified by gwalker on Jul 16, 2021 at 12:46:03pm
gwalker
Bio page
gwalker
Joined
Aug 8, 2001
Last login
Mar 29, 2024
Total posts
55,007 (7,308 FO)